Anyone watched Brian Green's mini series on NOVA (The Fabric of the Cosmos)? The whole thing is mind blowing but this part really stands out. You may have heard Green talk about something called the Holographic Principle at the end of the first episode. The principle arose out of a years long debate between Stephen Hawkins and a physicist named Leonard Susskind. (Susskind's book is here)
There's a brief mention of this in the Science In Action thread but i wanted to ask a different question.
In a nut shell, Hawkins had theorized that anything that fell into a black hole was lost forever but Susskind countered that that idea contradicted Quantum Mechanics. The debate went on over decades, with the end result that Hawkins conceded and Susskind had developed a new model of what happens in the near vicinity of a black hole....that 3 dimensional matter falling into the BH is not destroyed or lost but that it is "preserved" as 2 dimensional "data" on the surface of the black hole and that it should be possible to reconstruct the object from that information. Now here's the weird part where holograms come in; Suuskind's model says the the information stored on the surface of the black hole is projected inward (although what "inward" means when your talking about black holes...) as 3 dimensional holograms inside the black hole AND that it looks like all the universe that we see around us, including ourselves, is this kind of holographic projection.

I. have. no. idea. what. that. means.

But it made me think of a question that I can wrap my head around (almost). If we read science fiction now, the best of it takes current ideas like this and plays with the implications while the worst of it (well, not worst but the simplest? I'm not sure what the best word is here) the most common form is about flying around in space ships and meeting sexy alien women..(you know, Star Trek).
But that's today with our current state of knowledge and technology looking forward and fantasizing about what the future might be......so what do Capt's Kirk and Picard read for science fiction in the far future?

It means, in a flippant sort of way, that within black holes is an exactly copy of the universe without the blackhole. Essentially, they are their own pocket universe according to Susskind, but that's a very surface understanding of the whole thing and doesn't get at the implications of it.

As for what science fiction will be like in the 24th century, I have a hard enough time imagining what science itself will be like by then.

24th century science fiction will be about 24th century sociological problems wrapped in settings based on projections of 24th century technologies into the future.

And about heroic young men flying to another planet and meeting a pretty alien princess.

The tech may change, but the stories won't.

"...Their aim in war with Germany is nothing more, nothing less than extermination of Hitlerism... There is absolutely no justification for this kind of war. The ideology of Hitlerism, just like any other ideological system, can be accepted or rejected, this is a matter of political views. But everyone grasps, that an ideology can not be exterminated by force, must not be finished off with a war.” - Vyacheslav Molotov, ""On the Foreign Policy of the Soviet Union", 31 October 1939

It means, in a flippant sort of way, that within black holes is an exactly copy of the universe without the blackhole. Essentially, they are their own pocket universe according to Susskind, but that's a very surface understanding of the whole thing and doesn't get at the implications of it.

As for what science fiction will be like in the 24th century, I have a hard enough time imagining what science itself will be like by then.

That much I get but the very idea of "inside" a black hole seems to contradict what i thought I knew about black holes.
But if I understand what they're saying, if not the concept itself, not only are black holes "pocket universes" but we are also such a pocket universe living inside our own black hole. Holographic projections of something happening 13.7 billion light years from here.

I have to read that book.

But as to the crew of the Enterprise, maybe they won't read science fiction at all. maybe they will prefer Tolkien-esque fantasies to escape from the daily reality of metal corridors and computerized toasters

Storyteller wrote:And about heroic young men flying to another planet and meeting a pretty alien princess.

That was early 20th century science fiction, otherwise known as the Barsoom novels.

And the plot of "Avatar".

"...Their aim in war with Germany is nothing more, nothing less than extermination of Hitlerism... There is absolutely no justification for this kind of war. The ideology of Hitlerism, just like any other ideological system, can be accepted or rejected, this is a matter of political views. But everyone grasps, that an ideology can not be exterminated by force, must not be finished off with a war.” - Vyacheslav Molotov, ""On the Foreign Policy of the Soviet Union", 31 October 1939

GlassHouse wrote:That much I get but the very idea of "inside" a black hole seems to contradict what i thought I knew about black holes. But if I understand what they're saying, if not the concept itself, not only are black holes "pocket universes" but we are also such a pocket universe living inside our own black hole. Holographic projections of something happening 13.7 billion light years from here.

I have to read that book.

But as to the crew of the Enterprise, maybe they won't read science fiction at all. maybe they will prefer Tolkien-esque fantasies to escape from the daily reality of metal corridors and computerized toasters

Yep. Recurssive reality. It's an extension, sort of, of the brain in a jar concept, just with the added twist of the realization that, if all implications are present, that there's no such thing as an "original" universe. All realities are images in realtime of other realities outside of our own. Think of it in relation to Mermaid Theory and it gets even a little stranger I think.

Storyteller: I do not mention that movie. That horrible, horrible movie which is nothing but Dances With Wolves with giant Smurfs instead of Indians. Not to mention a solid rip off of Poul Anderson (and other authors to boot).

vison wrote:I seem to recall Carl Sagan pointing out that Spock's mum would have had more luck mating with an earthly petunia than with an alien. She would at least have shared some DNA with the petunia.

LOL! And then he published a coffee table book revealing his conceptions of alien life on other planets, and some of them are missing eyes, and some of them are missing ears, but none of them are missing both.

Which explains, if you think about it, our naive self-importance in sending pictures and music from earth out to the edge of galaxy, where aliens might be blind or deaf but surely not both.

And no one asked me, by the way, before they launched the Voyager, whether I wanted Earth's telephone number written on the bathroom wall of every biker bar in the universe. Luckily, the odds that anyone will be able to read it are practically zero.

What will science fiction be like in the future? It will be exactly like it is in the present, only longer.

In the year 5555
Your arms are hanging limp at your sides
Your legs got not nothing to do
Some machine is doing that for you

In the year 6565
Ain't gonna need no husband, won't need no wife
You'll pick your son, pick your daughter too
From the bottom of a long glass tube

In the year 7510
If God's a-comin' he ought to make it by then
Maybe he'll look around himself and say
Guess it's time for the Judgement day

In the year 8510
God is gonna shake his mighty head
He'll either say I'm pleased where man has been
Or tear it down and start again

In the year 9595
I'm kinda wondering if man is gonna be alive
He's taken everything this old earth can give
And he ain't put back nothing

Now it's been 10,000 years
Man has cried a billion tears
For what he never knew
Now man's reign is through
But through the eternal night
The twinkling of starlight
So very far away
Maybe it's only yesterday

In the year 2525
If man is still alive
If woman can survive
They may find

In the year 3535
Ain't gonna need to tell the truth, tell no lies
Everything you think, do or say
Is in the pill you took today

Science fiction of the future? All we have to do is figure out the next big fear. Not sure what that could be.. maybe since we've spent the last few hundred years killing God, it's time to bring him back.

The fascinating thing about the Holographic Principle is that it's not limited to just black holes. Without attempting to go into it in detail, mainly because I couldn't if I tried, the basic premise is that any 3 dimensional space has its entire information encoded on a surrounding boundry. If true, then it's possible that we are not in fact in reality, but instead a projection of the reality which exists on the boundry of our space. In other words, our 4 dimensional space-time existence might just be the shadow of a 5 dimensional universe and we are not the corporeal beings we once thought.

vison wrote:I seem to recall Carl Sagan pointing out that Spock's mum would have had more luck mating with an earthly petunia than with an alien. She would at least have shared some DNA with the petunia.

.

Well they could use one of those holographic disguise thingies like in Galaxy Quest